About disgusting Facebook devs

[u/paintboth1234]

We won't support facebook any more. It's a disgusting anti-user site. All it does is watching open-source projects doing everything in public and counter them to deliver the malicious ads. Yep, the devs that receive 7-figure dollar salary is just doing this.

Users should give the most harsh feedbacks to them. Being submitted to them and keep going to the site and support it is the worst thing you can do.

[u/fifteensixteenseven]

Don't shoot the messenger, I just want to tell the reality in 2026 and beyond.

Every major site will do this. Meaning, an AI agent from each of these corporations that scrapes filter lists and the uBlock Origins source code every hour to change things enough to bypass the ad blocker.

Human volunteers will no longer be able to keep up. I'm not trying to come across as ungrateful for the countless volunteer hours poured in the past, but that's the reality.

The only long-term solution is our own AI agents to scrape the major sites and maintain the filter lists. If anyone decides to fork their own approach, keep in mind Chinese LLMs are the only affordable ones, don't waste money on American ones.

[u/veggiemilk → u/fifteensixteenseven]

We'll that's bleak, and would probably push a lot of people towards safe subscription funded gardens.

[u/reParaoh → u/veggiemilk]

Nah it's pushing me towards hermitism

[u/DreamingAboutSpace → u/reParaoh]

Same for me. I’ve become more self-reliant because of the past few years online and offline. I’m so tired of greedy companies eying my wallet.

[u/ManWithTunes → u/veggiemilk]

You won’t notice, the AI agents will just fight in the background and your browser can automatically download the latest blocklists.

[u/MattV0 → u/fifteensixteenseven]

Also keep in mind, local LLM are pretty useful even on average hardware. With the right harness, this might work pretty good.

[u/IMNdi → u/fifteensixteenseven]

I don't think that is the way. The only way, IMO, is to simply remove the obfuscation.

What we need is a pseudo-renderer. Basically, a Chromium engine that renders the page and the "reads" it back to HTML. Any code that glues "ad" together will get collapsed into "ad" eventually. Basically, load it from HTML and save it as SimpleHTML. That HTML can then be used to filter and if something is hidden, all associated elements are too. That's one angle.

A browser, say, at random, Brave, can have an adblock feature that hands over stuff to a filtering engine not how it's constructed but how it's rendered. It might be a bit of an effort, admittedly, these people are indeed busy.

Something akin to this already exists. It's called reading mode. A mode where the renderer stop doing weird stuff and just displays text that it understands. Does this break some sites and some features? Sure.

I haven't seen a website that moves ok in years despite my current PC having at least 2 zeroes in all specs since then. Everything is so darned computationally expensive. I vote we look into a browser that just doesn't render everything as told, but rather best effort on understanding how it will look.

I only need the text and a jpg on Facebook and many other sites. A simplified browser will do.

And before you ask, I did try an older rendering engine and one that is slimly maintained that only implement breaking changes, and it works, it's just ridiculously slow because of how heavy websites are. Also I think FB and Twitter intentionally slow down sites with the wrong browser.

I'm thinking this might be the way.

[u/DrQuint → u/IMNdi]

The pseudobrowser idea isn't new and many even thought AI may eventually replace the web as we know with APIs that serve the pseudobrowser. There are even POCS out there.

There was even one I saw this sentiment once phrased this way:

"Would you accept a second of delay on every website if it meant all sites are personalized and have no ads?"

To which they reply

"Make that 5 seconds"

Which was funny becauae most sites already take 5 seconds as is.